Gouache Landscapes: Paint Evocative Scenes

1. Introduction - Why You'll Love Gouache: For me, gouache is the next natural step after watercolors. I love how versatile this medium is because it affords all the convenience of watercolors like easy re-wettability, portability, easy cleanup, and then it combines all of that with the opaque painting methods of acrylics and oils like the ability to layer lighter colors over darker colors, and the fast drying ability of acrylics, and the ability to correct any mistakes that you've made with an opaque layer of color. Hi I'm Trupti Karjinni, an artist and paint maker from India. I'm also the owner of Blue Fine Arts where we make handmade watercolors and sketchbooks. You can find out more about me on my Skillshare profile. All of August, I'm doing the 31 days of mini paintings challenge and I've chosen gouache as my medium. I make at least one mini landscape everyday and I'm on day 22 currently and I've discovered a lot of great techniques to use gouache in expressive landscapes. In this class, we'll be painting a gouache landscape in a loose and abstract style. We will take a look at our tools and materials, and then we'll dive into the different techniques that we'll be needing today. In the end, we're going to combine all of that to paint an expressive landscape that's gonna evoke the feelings of a summer sun and cool breeze on a sunny day at the beach. This class is great for beginners as well because I'm going to walk you through all the steps that we're going to need. So trust me, you're in good hands. So let's get right into the class. 2. Materials: In my experience, I've found that gouache is not highly demanding medium in terms of materials but also I found out that a lot of watercolor materials overlap with gouache and let's take a look at that. Let's start with the gouache paints themselves. The ones that I use are my Holbein artist gouache two paints and they come in this 12 color set. A friend of mine actually got this for me from Japan and I've got a really good deal on these price-wise. I found that the Holbein artist gouache artist grade they are really thick and creamy and they're so insanely highly pigmented that just a little bit of the gouache from these tubes goes of very very long way. Honestly, they're so highly pigmented that it took a while for me to get used to the extreme pigmentation in these paints. They are really worth the money. When it comes to gouache , I would recommend you go for artist grade gouache because I have tried student grid gouache and it was really frustrating to work with them because you don't get this really clean high-pigmented and matte finish with the student grid. It just makes it very frustrating to mix good colors with student grid gouache paints and I'm really happy with my Holbein artist gouache. In the next segment I will talk to you about which colors exactly I'm going to be using from this set. But for now, let's take a look at the rest of the materials. Typically in gouache, as is the case in all the opaque mediums, you need a lot more white than you need other colors because you'll be using white to mix a wide variety of sheets. When I was in Germany this January, I bought 85 ml bottle of this Lascaux gouache. I'm going to be using the white gouache from this bottle and not from my set. For the brushes, I found that gouache is not as demanding as it is with watercolors. Because in watercolors you need a lot of pigment and water carrying capacity in your brushes but with gouache, my personal preference has been synthetic brushes. Of course, you can go ahead and use your animal hair brushes like you Alinsky sables or your sable brushes. But I found that the synthetic brushes have a bit of a snap and they lend a nice texture when I'm painting with them. I like to control that I have with my synthetic brushes when I'm painting with my gouache. All the brushes that I have here are from Princeton and the ones that I'm going to be using are two Princeton velvet edge flat brushes in size 10 and size six. The reason that I'm almost exclusively going to be using these flat brushes is because, they are great way to loosen your brushstrokes and also to get them more of an abstract field to your landscape than a more detailed one and that's the move that I'm going for in my art style. I'm going to be using these flat brushes. But for some splatters and maybe some fine details, I might use my round brushes. These are my Princeton heritage rounds in size six and size two. These are the brushes I'll be using and I found my Princeton brushes to be really awesome. Honestly, I mean, I don't have any other words for them. But you can use any synthetic brushes for your gouache. It really doesn't matter, but just make sure that you're using good quality brushes. For papers. Your watercolor paper will work perfectly well with gouache. One thing I do want to put it out there that you're typical 100 percent cotton cold press paper which has like a beautiful texture on it, works great with watercolors, but it doesn't work as well for gouache, because you need to put in a lot of work to push the pigment through the rough surface of the paper. You might find that smoother surfaces work really well for gouache and what I have here is a 25 percent cotton cold press paper. Although it's called pressed paper, but since this is 25 percent cotton, it's a lot smoother than your typical 100 percent cotton cold press paper. For the final piece I'm going to be using this paper. I also have a sketchbook here. This is sketchbook by Hazel notebooks. They're made in India and this sketchbook is made of really smooth Bristol paper and it's thick. It's really stiff, it's thick, but it is beautifully smooth and I found that it works so well with the gouache and the matte finish that it has. We are going to be doing our practice strokes in this sketch book. Find something smooth but good quality paper for gouache and you'll be good to go. The way I prefer working with gouache is when they're fresh out of the tube. Because I like the creamy consistency of the paint a lot a lot more than when it dries and becomes hard like this here. I've found it almost impossible to get that nice creamy consistency once the gouache paint dries. I'm not a huge fan of dried gouache in a foldable palette or something. To facilitate my need to use fresh paint right out of the tube, I use my handy flat ceramic palette, which is just a ceramic plate and what I do is I just squeeze out little dabs of color onto the palette. I prefer using the rest of the area to mix the different shades that I need. This is the way that I've been using my gouache paints for my 31 days of many paintings project. To sketch different elements of the landscape on my paper, I just use a regular pencil and eraser. The great thing about gouache is that since it's an opaque medium, you can go as dark as you want with your pencil sketch. That's another advantage of quash that I really like. You will of course, need paper towels and a jar of water. Now that we've taken a look at our materials, let's jump onto the next section where we will take a look at the colors that we're going to use. I'm going to show you some mixes of colors that I'm going to use for the landscape today and then we will go ahead and practice different elements of our landscape before beginning the finite 3. Gouache overview: There are many Skillshare classes on the basics of gouache, so I'm not going to bore you with a long-term, or [inaudible] of gouache. I'm going to talk about the aspects where gouache as a medium has really shined for me because I used to be primarily a Watercolor artist before, and there are certain things about gouache that has really benefited me as an artist, and helped me branch out and develop some new skills. Couple of things about gouache real quick, if you don't know about this medium, gouache is a highly pigmented water-based media, which means that once it's dry, you reactivate it with water, and then you add water to make it more viscous so that you can use it on your surface. Gouache is also made with an extremely high load of pigment, which means that it's more vibrant, and it's also thicker than water colors. The best thing about gouache when compared to watercolors is its opacity. In all of my watercolor classes, I point out that if you want to lighten your colors, and watercolors, you need to add water and tint them down, and not add white to it. That's the opposite in gouache. Since gouache is an opaque medium, you can of course tint it down with water, and bring it to a watercolor like consistency like I've done here. Or to get a really light shade, you can add white, and lighten the shade. Because of this amazing opacity of gouache, you can mix a wide variety of colors, using just primary colors of white and black. It's extremely useful in getting a ton of column mixes when you have just a limited number of tubes. This matte look is what I really love about gouache, which cannot be found in any other medium. Two of the biggest advantages that are found in gouache is that one, it's fast drying, it dries really quick so you can do multiple layers and finish up a painting really quick. Second, the ability to go light or dark. Because of this opacity of gouache, and the ability to do lighter layers over darker layers, it's possible to meet more complicated compositions with gouache. It's really handy when it comes to illustrations and stuff. 4. Color mixing: This is the reference photo for today's landscape. I got this from an app called Esri Splash, which is just a fantastic place to get royalty-free photos so that you're not infringing on somebody's copyright. This photo is in the attachment in the class description. You will find it over there. Please print out a picture or open that picture on your phone because you won't be able to see the full clarity of this picture here because of the brightness of the video. The colors that we're going to need today is very cheerful turquoise, a light-blue color for the sky, and we need a sandy color for the beach, a darker greenish-bluish turquoise for the ocean, and we need several different colors for the palm leaves. First, you can see that the palm leaves are hit with a fiery orangey light from the sun and so we're going to need this orange color and we're also going to need these darker, almost brownish green colors over here. Let's take a look at how we're going to mix these colors with gouache. First, I'm going to run you through the colors that I'm using today. The first one is permanent yellow deep, the next one is flame red, and then we have burnt sienna, a permanent green deep, which is a very cool phthalo green type of green, but we are going to be able to mix really awesome natural-looking greens from this color, and then the next one is turquoise blue for the sky, and a little bit of the ivory black, and of course, we are going to use some whitewash. A couple of color mixes are really important here in our landscape. My set of [inaudible] artist gouache is missing. Several important colors like nice turquoise, green color, and also a very important color, that is, yellow ocher, and I'm going to have to mix these colors. For the orange highlights of the leaves here, I'm going to mix permanent yellow deep and flame red. If I want to make this more opaque, I'm going to add more white to it. Remember one thumb of rule in gouache, that if you want to make the color opaque, just add white to it. Although it's going to tamp down the color, it's going to lighten it. But that's the best way that you can add more opacity if you want that in your layers. For the sandy color, I'm going mix some burnt sienna, some permanent yellow, and some white; should give me a sandy yellow ocher color. There you go. Just a little bit more white and I'll be able to use it for the sandy part. For the ocean turquoise, we are going to mix some of this phthalo green, which is the permanent green deep, and some of the turquoise. My camera does not capture turquoise colors too well so this color is a lot more greener than what it looks like to you on the screen. But once you mix your own colors, you'll understand what I'm talking about. I'm really happy with the color mixes here. Another color that I want to mix is a dark brown color using burnt sienna with a tiny bit of black. The moment I add a little bit of this ivory black, I immediately end up with a burnt umber type of color, which I really like. The last color mix that we want to work on is getting a rich olivey green color for the palm trees. I have my same permanent green deep here and I'm going to add a bit of that burnt sienna to this and since burnt sienna is a reddish orange color and red is the complement of green, it immediately brings down the vibrancy of this green, which is what I want because this green is unnaturally green. Let's test that here. It's a nice deep green color. For lighter values in the palm tree, I'm going to add a little bit of yellow to this. It immediately gives me this nice olive green color. 5. Techniques: Now let's move on and practice certain elements of the landscape before we begin painting them. In the picture, you can see that the sky is in a nice gradient. In any landscape, the sky's always darkest on the top and then as you come closer to the horizon, it becomes lighter and lighter. We need to practice how to get the blending of this gradient right. The second thing that I want to practice with you today is how to get the shapes of these palm leaves, and how to get this orange highlight. We're also going to be using our flat brushes to do that. Let's start with practicing the palm leaves first. Since we're going to be using a flat brush entirely, I want you to get acquainted with it. I'm mixing this nice orange with the permanent yellow deep and the flame red. You can see that these palm leaves have a fiery orange kiss from the sun, and I want that to shine through. The way I approach this is to make the entire palm tree with a base coat of orange and then go with green on top of that. This is one way to add the highlights. This is the palm leaf shape that we are usually accustomed to, where we see each individual leaf protruding from the central spine. But when palm trees are bent at different angles, they have a spine and then they bend down and have this look. Now you can see that I've painted each individual leaf with a very thin brush. But since the landscape is small and I am going for a more abstract approach, I don't want to do that. I'm going to use my flat brush to do everything, and I'm going to show you how. Let's practice this leaf here. You can see that it has a spine here and it's bent down and it has all these leaves sticking out of it. I'm going to paint that, the spine, using the edge of my brush. To imitate this motion, I'm going to use the brush and flick it so that it comes to this frayed edge, towards the edge here. Suddenly, you can see that it is looking like palm leaf, and that's the kind of abstraction that we're going for here. Let's paint a couple more. My center is here, so I'm going to paint one leaf here. This one is curved, so I'm going to do another one. I'm not trying to capture all the leaves in this over here. I'm just trying to capture a few of them to get the general shape of the of the tree right. It's all about capturing the spirit of whatever it is that you're painting, and that's the approach that I like taking in my own artworks. Once we're done with this, what I'm going to do is go back in the with the dark green that I mixed, and I'm going to start adding the darks over this layer of orange. I don't want to overpower it. I don't want to lose the bits of these orange sun kissed leaves, so I'm going to take care to avoid that. You can see how, because of these brush strokes and the base layer of orange, the sun kissed part of the palm leaves is really shining through. I'm also going to go in and paint this olive green color that I've mixed by adding yellow to this green. With any of my consequent layers, I'm not trying to overpower the base colors that I'm painting this on. Towards the end, I'm going to mix a very, very dark green color using a little bit of black, some burnt sienna, and some of this green. Using a very thick consistency, I'm just going to add a few darks to this. Just a few. Don't try and overpower it or else you'll lose all these beautiful highlights that you've worked in for. Or else you're going to lose all these beautiful highlights. This is how I capture the movement of the palm tree leaves while also keeping the highlights of it. This is a technique that I tried for the first time in my summer palms painting, and it worked really, really well. Now let's practice how to get a gradient for the sky. For that, I'm going to use my turquoise blue, which is a nice sky blue color from my whole bindset. Although I don't know why they call it turquoise, it doesn't look turquoise to me. It's just a blue. I'm also going to need quite a large amount of white for this. I'm going to put dollops of white next to this blue. I'm going to start by painting the darkest value of this blue at the top here. I'm using a fairly thick consistency in this entire landscape. As I come down, I am going to start adding more and more white to it. Honestly, I found that getting blends is not as easy as it is in watercolors when it comes to gouache. Sometimes you might get sudden shifts of color from one color to the next, so blending does take quite a bit of work. As I come closer to the horizon, you can see that the horizon is almost white with very little blue. I'm just going to bring in some pure white now here at the bottom, and walk the white upwards and bring it downwards. By repeating this motion with thick paint, you can get a really good gradient. It's just like blending makeup. One last thing that I want to demonstrate to you in this practice piece is how to paint the clouds. Now I'm not going to paint clouds with my round brush. I'm going to paint them with my flat brush, and I'm going to show you the movements that I do. I'm going to grab pure white in a very thick consistency because I want maximum opacity, because white is going on top of the blue. I'm just going to give this layer a couple seconds to dry. This is the fast drying ability of gouache that I was talking about. It takes a lot longer in any other medium, also in watercolors, to dry a layer this fast. This is all short in real time and you can see how without any jump cards, you can see just how fast gouache dries. The way I'm going to paint my cloud is take my flight plush and make the swooping round motion. Using tiny motions like that, I get the shape of the clouds in. I quite like these querish shapes that I'm getting with my flat brush. It's what I greatly desire in my landscapes these days, because it just gives a lot of visual interest in my landscapes, and I really like that. My brush had a tiny bit of green left in the base of it. A lesson that we learned over here is when you are painting lighter colors and especially the sky, make sure your brush is totally clean because you don't want to get any greens in there. We've done enough practice. Let's move on to the next section where we will start painting our actual landscape. 6. Sketching Key Elements: Let's begin by sketching out a landscape to block in a few key elements. I'm first going to draw the horizon line. Now, you can see the inspiration picture that the sky is a little bit more than two thirds, and the ocean, and beach is a little less than one third. I actually like this composition because the large area of the sky allows me to highlight my main element. Which is the tallest punchy here. I'm going to keep the same ratio of, when I'm sketching out the landscape. This is my horizon line, and this is where the ocean meets the beach. Let's go ahead, and sketch our palm tree. Now,x I really like the placement of this palm tree because it works really well with the rule of thirds. But before sketching my trunk in, I'm going to place the center of the palm. Just so I don't get carried away with the composition, and take up too much space in the sky. We want everything to be proportionate. I'm just loosely blocking out a few of the palm tree leaves. Now, we can go ahead, and finish the trunk. It's very slender trunk, and I'm going to keep it that way. We've got the palm tree blocked in the first one. In the picture we can see that there's just one more palm tree. Which means that there are two objects. But I'm partial to this composition philosophy. You can save it. I like having objects in odd numbers, because it's proven to make artwork look more visually interesting. Instead of having just two palm trees, I'm going to put in three. Let's have another one. Actually, I want to bring the base of this palm tree a little bit in the front. This looks more grounded. The second tallest one I'm going to have over here. It's a rough sketch, and remember like gouache an opaque medium. You can go as dark as you want with your sketch. The last one is going to be this palm tree. I'm just going to place it right over here. I want it to come this high. We've got all the major elements blocked in. I'm not going to sketch the clouds because I'm going to place the clouds based on how the rest of the painting looks. That'll be the last thing that I'm going to paint. Let's just go ahead, and leave that you can sketch the shadows if you want. But I'm not going to do that, I'm just going to do it towards the end. Would be a bit more spontaneous that way. Now, the sketches done, let's go ahead, and start painting. 7. Blocking Colours: I'm going to bring that palette in and keep my inspiration picture on the side. I've provided the inspiration picture to you in the attachments in the class description, so you can just go ahead and download it. But I'm just going to have mine open on my phone. You might see it slip in and out of the frame but don't worry, you can just print your own picture and just have it with you while we're doing this class. I want to focus on showing you the color mixes on my palette more than showing you the inspiration picture all the time. Just like we did with the practice piece when we were practicing how to paint the palm leaves, I'm going to start out by blocking in the orange highlights of the palm leaves and then pin the sky around it. We're going to start with the palm leaves. I'm going to take my size 6 princeton flat shader and I'm going to make a nice orange with a permanent yellow deep and some of the flame red. Let's do like a test stroke with this. I'm quite happy with it, but I think it looks a little dark and it needs a little bit more opacity, so I'm going to grab some white and add a little bit of white to it. Let's test this again. Yeah, I think I'm happy with that. Using the edge of my brush I'm going to get the strokes in a way that they can represent the palm tree leaves. Again, notice how I'm not giving a lot of attention to the details because this is a small piece. I don't want it to look super detailed. As long as I've managed to capture the spirit of this landscape, I'm going to be happy with that. Not taking a lot of stress over details, honestly I find this absorbs quite therapeutic where I mean, I just feel like thinking like this also teaches me life lessons where I don't feel like I have to get hung up on the tiniest things, things that I can't control. For example, I was filming this class yesterday and I decided to chuck hours of footage out the window because I was just not happy with it. The lighting was just terrible. It felt like everything was working against me and so I decided, you know what, I'm just going to stop filming and come back at it later. I just hope today's filming works well. I mean, if you're watching this class of course, it did go well. Awesome. Now I have all the highlights of the palm leaves blocked in. Now, I'm going to go in and start painting the sky. Now, a couple of things that you want to remember when you paint the sky is in this approach, you want to get the gradient from dark to light while you're filling in the sky and another thing that you want to do is you want to block the sky around the shape of the palm leaves while leaving the white gaps untouched. What you want to do is just block in as much as you can of the sky and leave the rest of it white. I know it sounds weird, but I'm going to teach you how to integrate both of them and to give the finishing touches. This is an approach that I discovered while I was painting this and I'm really happy with how this turned out. Just go along with it and don't get tensed if you feel like things are getting out of hand. I'm going to grab some of my turquoise blue on the palette. Now I'm going to grab one of my bigger brushes that's the size 10 princeton flat shaders, and I'm going to tack in some of my paper towels underneath the palette so they are here when I need to dab some paint off or clean my brush. Let's start with blocking the darkest value of the sky on the top and then we have to blend it and bring it down to the horizon, gradually making it from darker to lighter. I'm going to start right at the top and I resolve not to use any masking tape for this mini painting because just because I like the rough edges, it looks really beautiful in my opinion. I'm just going to do that and observe how I'm using my flat brush to just block in the area around the palm tree and I'm leaving everything near toward white. I'm not going to touch the blue to the orange and gradually I'm going to start making this blue softer and blending it in. This can be a little tricky to get the blend to be perfect, so you might have to do a couple passes over this. But I mean, don't worry if you think that it's not turning out to be right. It's okay if you get like a patchy look to the sky because of the shape of this brush. I actually think that it looks good, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. Gradually making the sky lighter and lighter as we proceed down. Now that I'm really close to the horizon, I'm going to add more light to this and tart walking my way down. Now, it's important to stay patient at this stage because you are carving this sky around the palm tree leaves and I don't want to make the blue touch the orange, so carefully walk your way around it. I know you might be saying that I thought you said gouache is opaque mediums, so why are we doing this? But I don't know somehow I found this approach works well and the colors stay vibrant, because sometimes I found that in gouache, even though it's an opaque medium, just by adding a little bit more water, it might become transparent and it doesn't quite have that opaque effect, and as a result of that the colors might look muddy, even layered on top of each other. Just something that I've worked out and it got me great results. I'm pretty happy with how the sky is looking right now. Perhaps i could add a bit more blending over here. Once I'm happy with the blending, I'm going to stop here with the sky. I'm also not going to work on the palm leaves right now. Let's go ahead and tackle the ocean part. 8. Ocean And The Sand: For the turquoise green of the water, I mix some permanent green deep and sounds the turquoise blue to get this aquatic turquoise color. I'm going to use the darkest value of these two painter further horizon color of the ocean. Using my flat brush, again, I'm working around the tree trunks, which is just going to prevent the muddling of colors later. Now the closer I come to the horizon, I'm going to start adding more white to this. Just add more white to the same column and make sure to lighten it and then come closer to the horizon so you get this nice blend. That's the ocean part done. It was really as easy as that. I'm actually quite happy with this now. But if you want to add a little bit more interest to your ocean, you can just grab a smaller brush and just print a few streaks to indicate the ripples or the waves in the ocean. Great. I'm really happy with how the ocean has turned out I'm not going to mess with it much. Now, I'm going to go ahead and start blocking in the sand. I'm missing a couple of important colors. As I said in my hold line artist squash set, I don't have a yellow ocher and as far as I'm concerned, that's it's a huge impediment to not have a color as important as that. But I've managed to mix a color that's close to what I wanted for the sand using burnt sienna, little bit of white and some of this permanent yellow. Which I want add a little bit more or because I want to make the sand a little warm. I do want a little bit more white in it and bingo, I'm really happy with this color. Let's get some more white on the pallet to just work this color in. As you can see that in this picture, I think it might be a little bright for you to see. But check off your reference picture, you can see that the center part of it is a lot lighter and then there's like a warmer touches the sand towards the edges. I'm going to maintain that by adding a lot of white towards the center and blending it with the ocean and let's see. I did a touch more warm. You can go ahead and fill in the sand over the trunk because they all belong to the same color family anyway. [inaudible] is not looking fine. If you want to lighten the color even more, you can just simply bring in some pure white over this just to lighten it up. If that the color you're looking for, so I and just grab the white here and just pure white, bring it straight onto the landscape and start blending it in. But you can only do this when the paint is still wet. If you want to have that whiten what going on. 9. Layering The Leaves: The reason why I first worked in the leaves and the sky, then the ocean and then the sand is because I wanted both of these layers to dry before I start working on this part, just to avoid mixing muddy colors and having a mess in the already little space that we have. Let's mix in nice olive green color with our permanent green deep burnt sienna and maybe a touch of the yellow. I'm first going to mix in a lighter color. We'll test it on a sketchbook. Yeah, I'm quite happy with that. When I'm mixing colors in gouache, I'm trying to not dilute them down a lot because I like the creamy consistency of these colors. I want to maintain that when I'm painting because it feels great to work with a ticker medium. If I wanted to dilute everything down, I would much rather work with watercolors. Try and take advantage of this medium for what it's best known for. I start laying in the green and take care that you don't want to overpower this orange. You don't want to lose it. Just be careful about that. I'm going to take one good look at how these leaves are being painted and then proceed accordingly. You can see here that the leaves, this bunch over here is dark compared to the rest of the portion. Just going to keep that in mind as well. Once I'm done with this one, I'm going on to the rest of them and do the same thing. Again, remember that we're just trying to capture the gentle shape of these leaves, not every detail. It's important to remember to let go of control and be okay with the abstraction. The first layer of these dark leaves has already dried, but I feel like it's all a little too dark and very few highlights. I'm going to try and fix that. I'm going to mix a lighter, more pastel shade of the green. I'm going to test it on top of this patch to see if it stands out or not. I think I need to make it a little warmer. I'm always a stickler for greens. I find that green is the hardest color to be satisfied with, for me personally, I never really happy with the color that I mix. Does that happen to you guys that you're never really happy with this particular color that you mixed? Not trying to entirely cover the dark areas. Just trying to get a few of these light-color strokes in. I'm finding that I'm still not happy with the vibrancy of this underlying orange. I'm going to add more highlights now. I'm going to try and make this yellowish orange a little more opaque by adding white or yellow to this because I want it to be a brighter and I don't know why I'm feeling this red is cutting down the vibrancy. I'm going to have to check this first. Not really, this does not seem to be working. This happens even though I've done this before. Let's see if we can do something here. For these highlights, I definitely want very less water content because I want it to be thick so I can layer it and it has maximum opacity, so I don't want it to be diluted with water at all. For now I'm going to stop with the leaves and I'm going to start filling in the gap and start finishing this guy. Because after this I'm only going to add darker layers. I think it's going to be okay to layer the darker layers on top of the sky. 10. Adding Contrast and Tree Trunks: Let's go ahead and start filling in these white gaps that we have left around the tree leaves. Here's where a little bit of guesswork comes in, you want to mix the same shade of blue that is in that particular area when you start filling in these gaps. I've taken my smaller brush again, the size 6 flat and I'm going to start filling in the color next to these leaves without losing the shape, which means I'm trying to negatively fill in the area around the leaves. Gradually mixing in more light, even if I can't get all the white areas out, it's fine. I'm just going to leave it like that because I find that leaving little bits of white around the edge of these leaves gives them that highlight that we need, and that's totally okay. It actually works really well for the composition of the painting. Remember patience is the key and it's easy to get worked up, but don't do that. You know the reason why I also like blocking in bits of the sky after we are done with the leaves, is because you get this kind of chunkiness to the shape of the leaves that I really think works for the kind of competition that I like. Right there you see, you just get a seamless blend of the sky, and I'm really happy with how this has turned out. As you can see, there are little bits of white that we haven't been able to cover because of the tight spaces between the leaves and the brushes wouldn't go in. That is exactly what I wanted, the little bits of white, which if you've just painted them blue and then you've painted the leaves, you wouldn't have got these very natural-looking highlights, and this really makes me happy. Let's start painting the trunks of our trees. Oops, oops. Accident. Oh no, what are you doing? [inaudible] I can cover that up. Thank God. Let's do some spot fixing-here. This works. This is why I love Gouache so much, that you can just cover up your mistakes. Awesome, it's fixed. Let's go ahead and paint the trunks with a little less enthusiasm. I'm going to grab the same color that I mixed for the sand because as you can see, the trunks have some highlights in the center because of the sun shining on it, and the rest of it is like a darker brown color and I'm going to maintain that. I'm going to lay in my lighter color first. I love using flat brush for my landscape, this is because you get these chisel kind of look for a lot of things, and it works really well. I'm always really happy with how things turn out when I'm using my flat brush. I'm taking a good hard look at the trees and I think I want a lot more darks near the center and a few of the leaves here, and so I'm going to mix in a very dark, almost blackish-green color. Let me show you the mix, and in the meanwhile, I'm going to let the tree trunks dry. I'm going to get some green, but again I do not want a lot of water. I also don't want to mix any white in this at all, so I'm going to make some burnt sienna and make it really dark. To add a little more depth to this, I'm going to bring in a slight touch of this ivory black. Now this black is really overpowering, so I'm going to be very careful of how much I bring in. Let's test it. Okay. Pretty happy with this. Maybe a little bit more brown. Okay, let's do it. So be very careful with this stuff because you don't want to fill a lot of it with this, you don't want to have all powers. Your lights, you don't want to lose those highlights. So, of course, the center of the tree is darker and you want to keep that in mind as well. So you see how suddenly you have a lovely depth to this tree compared to how these two look, and that's the magic of adding good contrast to your compositions. Because of the dark contrast that I've added, now, all of a sudden my trees just stand out. They look more defined against this really nice cheerful tropical sky that we've got here. I might also add a slight touch of this burnt sienna, because it's just like such a fiery brown color and I think it works well with the rest of the colors that we have. But very light touches because I also don't want to overwork anything in this piece. Okay. Honestly, I'm really happy with how this has turned out. Let's go ahead and finish with the trunks and then add shadows on the ground and we'll be done. No, wait. We also need to add the clouds and then we'll be done. So for the shadows of the tree trunk, I mixed dark brown color with a little bit of black. A little bit of black and the burnt sienna gives me a lovely warm brown, quite like burnt umber. Let's check the mixes. Yeah. Again, I don't want a watering mixture of this. I'm also going to be very light handed because I don't want to lose the highlight. Coconut trees have these little ridges, which I can create just using these light dashes with the edge of my flat brush. It's this movement because the edge kind of splits a little bit so you get these very organic looking lines. Okay. We'll come back on this part in some time because I want to make it a little bit more light. So let's paint in this mound. Sometimes coconut trees rise out of these mound-like sand structures at the base. I'm happy with how the tree trunks are looking. I'm just going to come back in with these highlights because I'm not as pleased about how they look. So I'm going to make really light with some white and some of this yellow ocher color that I mixed and I'm just going to place some of that here. 11. Blowing Life Into The Painting: The next step is to add those shadows to the ground. I know typically when we think of shadows, we immediately want to whip up a gray because in our minds all shadows are gray but shadows are actually a reflection of the color that's around them. So if you observe closely in the picture, I don't think it's going to be as visible in the video, but look at the reference picture and you can see that the shadow color on the ground is actually a warmer brown color because the sand is an orangish brown, so the shadow is going to be a darker version of that with just a slight hint of gray in between. So I'm going to maintain that. I'm going to mix a gray using this color. So let's add a little bit of burnt sienna to this. I have a little bit of altered blue gouache. So I'm just going to mix that in slightly and tamp down this color. Let's check this. I'm really happy with how this has turned out so I'm going to use this for the shadows. But I'm also going to add in a little bit of white in it to make it a little less pronounced than it is. So I'm just going to go back in and be very spontaneous with the brush strokes that are going to make this shadows. Add a few shadows here. I don't like the angle of the shadows. I'm just going to do something with that. Once the shadows are done on the side, I also want a few shadows on the edge of the water as well. But those shadows, since I said, the shadow on the sand reflects the sandy color of the sand, the same shadows on the water are going to look a little cooler, a cooler blue colors, so I'm on just going to mix dark blue and tamp it on with the little bit of burnt sienna and test it. We'll test on this water here and this looks really good. Adding a bit more white to it again. So little details that you might think that nobody would notice, but it does add to the character and it ties everything together. So a few final touches that are remaining are, of course, the clouds. If you observe the palm tree, you can see that there are little gaps of sky visible between the leaves. But in our composition, all of this is just chock-full of greens and browns and oranges, and I want the sky to peek into that. Because when you have bits of sky showing through the leaves, it makes it look more realistic and more natural. So using my size six brush again, I'm going to mix a very thick mixture of the sky blue. I'm going to mix it a little lighter, with more whitener because it adds more opacity. Don't worry about matching this color to the sky. All we need is a thick, sky blue mixture with a lot of white in it because white is going to give us more opacity and that's what we need now. Using the side of my brush, I'm going to make single dabs. Do you see that? That's what's going to bring in bits of sky into our tree. So watch. One dab, I'm going to have a little bit here. So I want to add a little more white to this to make it more opaque. There you see. Same thing over here, but don't get too over-excited with the dabs because this is actually fun to do. You want to have only a little bit of the sky peeking through. I'm pretty much happy with how this has turned out. Time to bring in the clouds. So you can see that the clouds are nice and fluffy in our inspiration picture and there's a huge one here, but I'm not going to bring that in. I'm just going to paint this cloud here. And just a few clouds here at the bottom because I don't want them to overpower the background and take away any attention from the palm trees. The clouds are there to just act as sport and to amp up everything in this picture. So using my squared brush and these rounded movements, I'm just going to get the cloud. For this, do not add a lot of water to your gouache. I'm actually just using it straight out of my bottle. And there you have it, guys. The clouds are done, the sky is done, everything is done. Just one last touch. So the foreground is looking a tad bit too clean for me. So I'm going to add a little bit of atmospheric noise in there. And we're going do that using splatters. So you guys know that I'm a huge fan of splatters. They're an excellent way to get some interest into your landscapes or your floral compositions. So let's go ahead and get some splatters in. The splatters are going to be a dark brown just to show some bits of, I don't know, dirt and stuff in the sand. So I'm mixing the darker brown color and this is going to be more diluted because it's almost impossible to do with splatters, with thick consistency of the paint. So I'm using my Princeton size six Heritage brush to make the splatters, and I'm going to make the splatter on top of this tree because I don't want to ruin my beautiful white background. Let's hope I don't ruin it, just tapping my brush. So don't get too carried away with splatters like the atmospheric noise. There is a little bit of noise here and there and it's going to complete the look of the picture. You guys, we're done with the landscape and I'm really happy with how this has turned out. It's just like such a sunny piece of a slice of tropical beach right there in your hands and it makes me happy. It makes me full of light and cheerfulness and hope whenever I look at it and that is, I think, one of the reason why it's my favorite landscape that I have printed this year. 12. What Makes A Painting Evocative: There's a couple of things you might have noticed in this landscape that it has a general overall summary, sunny feeling to it. You can see that there's a breeze flowing from this end till this end. When I first posted some of palms mini on my Instagram, a lot of people told me that they were able to actually feel the breeze flowing through this painting. They said that they could feel it on their skin. That is one of the best things and artists can hear. How is it that I was able to invoke that feeling in the viewer? There are a couple of things that contributed to that. The first thing is that all the leaves of the palm trees are bent and moving in the same direction. You don't see the palm leaves just spread all around from the center, you see that they bend towards one direction and all the three trees have the same properties. All their leaves are bent in towards the right direction. This gives the impression that there is a breeze flowing from left to right in the landscape. The colors that we used they're all working towards lending a sunny day in this landscape. For example, the color of the sky is a very cheerful light turquoise blue. The color of the ocean is also a turquoise color. Lastly, the color of the sand is really light and it has these very defined shadows at the bottom. This is the reason why it gives a feeling that there's a sunny day in here. Also the atmospheric noise that we added, the splattered on the ground also ties everything together. It's these little things. It's the sunny sky peeking through the leaves. Everything comes together to invoke a feeling of happiness and cheerfulness in this lovely summer beach landscape. I hope that things like these, keep that in mind when you're painting a landscape. Look at the mood that you want to convey and think of how you can bring small elements in your landscape to help push that mood through the paper into the heart of your viewer. 13. Final Thoughts: In this class, using gouache, we learn how to layer different colors on top of each other, how to work our highlight in, and how to blend colors using the wet-and-wet technique. We also learned how to use small elements in a landscape to convey the mood and atmosphere that we want the viewer to feel. If you've worked your landscape in this class, please make sure you upload it in the project section because the best thing about being a Skillshare teacher is that I get to see what you create, and that's my favorite part for sure. I had a lot of fun sharing my experiences and learnings from my many paintings project and I hope you had a lot of fun in this class as well.